Examining history through the lens of Bertrand de Jouvenel's high-low vs. middle mechanism, C.A. Bond lays bare the hyper-centralisation of power under liberalism and democracy. He reveals the poverty of liberal accounts of history as a bottom-up process of grassroots change, instead showing history to be driven by patronage and the selection effects of power. In this, we discover the unsettling fact that many ideas so fundamental to modernity-from the "individual" to political science to human rights and beyond-are not the product of reason or progress, but of the demands of structural conflict.Ranging over such phenomena as Athenian democracy, radical Islam, Black Lives Matter, NGOs, the Enlightenment, the civil rights era, and feminism, Bond offers a secure theoretical basis for the illiberal revolt currently engulfing our world. The publication of this work is an event with which all historians and political observers will need to come to grips.